These Violent Delights

by Micah Nemerever

  Because Julian did have other friends, though Paul rarely saw them. Julian had thought of studying drama in his first semester, and occasionally the two of them were accosted on the snowy path by one of Julian’s buoyant, overwrought theater friends. Other times, the interlopers were colleagues from the arts pages of the student paper—these friends spoke in an identical arrogant drawl and made insipid comments about Max Stirner, and they never seemed to realize that Julian’s replies were making fun of them. After the initial introductions Paul always hung back at Julian’s side with his arms folded, staring at his shoes. If the friends acknowledged him at all, it was in the third person—your friend here, never his name.

  But no matter how mediocre or shallow the other friends were, even they could tell Julian was destined for something. They might not understand it, but they knew. When Julian addressed them, Paul watched the way their faces opened. They smiled as if they were already thinking of what they would say years later. That they knew him when he wasn’t anyone yet; that they were there before it all began.

  There was no avoiding them if they approached first, but whenever Julian caught sight of his friends at a distance he would take Paul’s arm and steer them out of sight. “I attract pretentious people,” he explained, and there was nothing in his voice that betrayed any fondness for them. “I think that’s why I like you so much, Pablo. You’re so goddamn sincere.”

  Paul never asked where the nickname came from, because it didn’t matter—what mattered was that Julian had given it to him unbidden. His real name was common, ordinary, something Julian might say and then forget saying. But Pablo rang like a harp string. Julian said it warmly, but it was an imperious kind of affection. It was as if this were the name he’d given a favorite belonging.

  Julian moved through every part of Paul’s life the same way—not entitled, nothing so crass and insecure, but taking for granted that Paul would allow him anywhere. His was an arrogant intimacy, the kind that followed Paul home without asking and spent the afternoon examining the bookcases and pantry shelves.

  Neither Paul’s mother nor his sisters were home that first day—he had the house to himself on Friday afternoons, or else he might have refused to let Julian inside. The fact that Paul allowed him into the house at all wasn’t the acquiescence Julian probably thought it was. He’d done it for the same reason that he embraced Julian’s nickname for him—the same reason he didn’t flinch away from the occasional brush of Julian’s hand on his shoulder. Paul was taking something for his own, and he wasn’t sure it was something Julian even knew he was giving.

  “So which door is yours?” Julian asked, one foot already on the bottom stair. It didn’t seem to have occurred to Julian that Paul might refuse him. Even Paul didn’t know why he did. But it pleased him to hold something back, if only for now. He liked the look that came over Julian’s face, the bewilderment that someone might tell him no and mean it.

  “My mother’s going to be home soon,” Paul said, and he caught himself smiling in the brief, exhilarating moment that Julian’s face faltered.

  That denial only lasted another week.

  He let Julian be the one to open his bedroom door, and from the foot of the bed Paul watched him help himself to the details. Julian carefully opened Paul’s drawers of butterfly and moth specimens, then paused at the desk to examine a watercolor—a rib cage emptied of heart and lungs, a trio of bright tropical songbirds trapped inside. There was a copy of The Man in the High Castle on the dresser next to Paul’s bed, and for a moment he panicked at having forgotten to hide it in favor of something more rarefied. But Julian picked it up and paged through it without apparent judgment.

  “God, and I’ve got you reading even more things about Nazis,” he said, and Paul only realized belatedly that he was supposed to laugh.

  Julian hopped onto Paul’s mattress and lay back against the pillows, legs outstretched, his head resting on the Leonard Baskin reproduction on the wall behind him. The sudden nearness of him was a shock—the warmth of his ankle gnawed alongside Paul’s hip, so close that Paul could have closed the distance between them and made it seem accidental. He watched how easily Julian settled into the same place Paul’s own body lay when he slept. Paul imagined the traces of him that would remain—a stray dark hair, fine scarlet fibers from his merino pullover.

  “It’s so funny the way you paint,” said Julian idly. “It’s like you checked out of the twentieth century sometime around Frida Kahlo, you still paint pictures of things . . . It’s all very Paul Fleischer, isn’t it? You don’t care what other people think you should be doing. It’s so blood-and-guts moral, so rigid. It’s exactly like you.”

  Paul was sure Julian wasn’t making fun of him—he knew by now exactly what that looked like, because he’d memorized the movement of Julian’s eyebrow and the dismissive angle of his mouth. He knew that Julian took him seriously, even when Paul himself felt foolish and overreaching. But that didn’t mean he could tell whether the remark was a compliment or a criticism.

  “That’s the way a person should be.” Paul’s certainty didn’t waver, but the longer he spoke, the more his confidence did. “Nothing imposed from the outside. You figure out on your own what’s good and what isn’t, and maybe that idea ends up being rigid, but that’s better than not having anything at all. I don’t care if anyone doesn’t like it, even if it’s you.”

  If Julian had asked where this thought came from, Paul would have had to lie a little to claim it for his own. It was similar to something his father had told him when he was young—that there was a difference between the law and what was just, and that being a good man meant building a framework for deciding which was which. For Paul justice could encompass infinite space, far past questions of crime and punishment. But Paul wondered in his cruelest moments if the idea had extended any further than the inside of his father’s own head.

  “You’re a Kantian to the core.” Julian laced his fingers and stretched his limbs like a cat; for the barest moment Paul could feel the light pressure of Julian’s leg brushing his. “I do like your paintings, by the way,” he added carelessly. “I don’t understand why you don’t just major in art, you’re good at it.”

  The compliment burned in his face, then at the outer edges of his ears. He didn’t dare acknowledge it.

  “It’s like you said,” he answered after a moment. “I don’t want other people telling me what to do.”

  Julian liked that, enough that he let Paul see that he did.

  “So what are you telling yourself to do?” asked Julian.

  That was something else Paul had been holding back, at once less personal and far more intimate than the mere physical spaces of his life. He had no name yet for what he was trying to become, nothing he wanted to be able to call himself—no “renowned conservationist,” no “famous painter.” The early sprouts of his ambition were still so deep under the earth that he couldn’t say for sure what it was.

  “Whatever I do has to mean something.” He hugged his knees and stared at them; it took all his nerve to raise his voice above a mumble. “I need to make something beautiful, something that lasts. I don’t know what, but I have to, if I want my life to matter at all.”

  When he finally made himself meet Julian’s eyes, he couldn’t find any doubt or ridicule in his face. Julian believed him, and his respect was so consequential that it felt like Paul’s first step toward mattering. Paul wasn’t sure he would ever grow used to it—this precipitous thrill of being seen and known and understood.

  “Surely it can matter even if it doesn’t last,” said Julian—not disagreeing, just prompting, the way he did with all their other thought experiments. “If you painted a masterpiece and then set it on fire, it still would have mattered. If you know you’ve made something beautiful, who cares how long it lasts? Après toi, le déluge.”

  “I like it better the other way,” said Paul. “Where it means you’re leaving the flood in your wake.”

  Julian smiled;
it was a private, elusive smile, almost as if he thought this were funny.

  “You would, wouldn’t you?” was all he said.

  They left soon after, at Paul’s insistence. It was getting dangerously close to the time his mother tended to drift back from her weekly appointment with Dr. Greenbaum. She was what he wanted to hold back the most, for as long as he could get away with.

  “They can’t possibly be that embarrassing,” Julian said as Paul hurried them to the far end of the block. “And even if they were, I’d never hold it against you.”

  “It’s not that,” said Paul. He couldn’t think of a way to articulate the real reason, which felt far more complex. He liked how clean the boundary was between what his family knew about him and what belonged to him alone. He had spent his entire life in a house whose doors had keyholes but no keys. It was a new sensation for him to have a secret, and he wasn’t ready to relinquish it.

  They made their way to the nearest deli. Paul was worried about the venue at first—it had been his grandparents’ lunch spot for decades—but it was off-hours and mostly empty, and Paul didn’t particularly recognize anyone, aside from the bored-looking girl behind the counter with whom he’d taken a civics class.

  Paul took a while to decide on what he wanted, while Julian quickly loaded his tray with soup and cookies and cake slices and went to claim them a table. By the time Paul had selected his meal (turkey sandwich, French fries, ginger ale, a single deviled egg), Julian had nearly finished his first cup of coffee.

  He had also retrieved one of the plastic mat chessboards from their shelf over by the napkins, and was arranging the pieces—not into their starting configuration, but an elegant midgame chaos. The positions looked familiar. Paul had seen something like them on the portable chess set in Julian’s room.

  “Pop quiz,” said Julian as Paul arrived. “Say you’re playing black. What’s your next move?”

  It took Paul longer to contemplate this than he would have preferred; he was distracted by the belated realization that there wasn’t any dignified way to eat his egg. But Julian appeared content to let the silence linger. He poured Paul a cup of coffee and placidly dropped his crackers into his soup one by one.

  Finally, Paul moved one of his knights to threaten the white bishop. When Julian didn’t visibly react, he began to doubt his instincts. “Is that right?” he asked too quickly. “I’m not going to pretend I’m, you know, great at it—”

  “It’s a solid move. Maybe a little conservative, but it’s solid.” Julian reached to return the knight to its previous place. “But watch this.”

  He picked up the black queen and pulled her across the board to check the king. It was an option Paul had immediately written off as suicidal, positioning the queen such that white had no choice but to capture her. Only after he saw the aftermath did he understand the beauty of it—the way the sacrifice burned the path clear, so that no matter how white chose to reply, he would find himself in checkmate two turns later.

  Julian was watching him, grinning. Paul looked between him and the board in disbelief.

  “Did you . . . ?”

  Julian gave a sudden, dismissive laugh.

  “God, no,” he said, so ruefully that he sounded almost defensive. “I had nothing to do with this, trust me.”

  Julian rifled through his satchel and produced a cheap paperback, battered and dog-eared and creased sharply along the spine. He opened to a page in the middle and handed it over. U.S. Open 1970—Kazlauskas v. Kaplan—Championship Final. Paul’s knowledge of chess notation had atrophied since junior-high chess club, but the queen sacrifice was easy enough to find because white had immediately resigned. The transcriptionist gave the move a double exclamation mark.

  “The whole game was like that,” said Julian. “I was there. I’ll never forget that moment—the way the whole room drew a deep breath at the same time as they realized.”

  “What were you doing at the U.S. Open?”

  Paul had never seen Julian look embarrassed before.

  “Ugh—I had no business being there. I was barely in the Juniors section, I was cannon fodder for the cannon fodder. All I really got for my trouble was a few days away from boarding school.”

  He picked up the black queen and left the piece lying on its side next to the salt shaker. Paul waited for him to speak again; it felt wiser and more honest than offering an uninformed reassurance.

  “It was a beautiful game. Even between grandmasters, that’s not a given, there’s plenty of ugly chess even at the highest levels. But this game, this goddamn game—the whole time you could see the players trying to take each other apart and push each other as far as they could go. And it’s gorgeous—when chess is played at its best, by two genuinely great players, it’s a work of art made from pure reason. It was . . . Watching them build that game together—and after I’d spent the whole tournament proving my own absolute mediocrity—but anyway, how beautiful it was, and how far it was from anything I’d ever be able to do, it broke my heart a little, is all.” He pulled a face. “God, sorry about that, that sounds so mawkish.”

  “No, it doesn’t.” The protest sounded more emphatic than he’d planned. “Beautiful things are supposed to hurt. It’s what I was saying earlier—even if you don’t know how you’re going to create something that matters, you can still want to do it so badly you can barely think about anything else—”

  Paul thought, for a moment, that Julian was reaching across the table to take his hand. Then Julian retrieved the black queen, and Paul understood in a rush how foolish he was being, how little sense the gesture would have made. They weren’t children. Perhaps that would have to be another self-improvement project for the journal—observing how grown men spoke and behaved around each other so that he could mimic it more effectively.

  “People tell you you’re ‘shy’ all the time, don’t they?” said Julian. He watched Paul’s face with a slight frown, as if he were listening to a familiar tune in an unusual key. “And then they act like you’re crazy when you do speak up, just to drive the point home that being shy is safer?”

  Paul didn’t reply, at least not aloud, but Julian knew the answer already. He swept the board clear and smiled.

  “Don’t listen to them. The rest of the world might not be ready for you, but I don’t know how I ever got on without you. You play white,” he added. “I want to see how you think when you have to move first.”

  Paul could tell he was blushing, and Julian made it known, wordlessly, that he had noticed and would take it for what it was. This often happened between them now, the silent transmission of recognition and acceptance. Paul thought that Julian must see some immense potential in him, an early glimmer of all he hoped to become. It was the only way he could make sense of Julian’s willingness to forgive him.

  4.

  “So honey, when do we get to meet your new friend?”

  Paul instantly wished he hadn’t dawdled so long at the breakfast table. He could tell from Audrey’s reaction that this wasn’t the first she’d heard of the subject. She sighed as if trying to hide her annoyance and took a purposeful swig from her orange juice.

  “Which friend?” he said.

  It wasn’t convincing, and neither his mother nor his sisters did him the courtesy of pretending it was. His mother smiled at him obligingly and ignored the question altogether.

  “Mrs. Koenig,” she said, “mentioned you have a friend who comes by sometimes. She says she doesn’t think he’s from the neighborhood.”

  “Mrs. Koenig is hoping he’s a drug dealer,” Audrey muttered into her glass. “Smug buttinsky.”

  “She said he looked perfectly nice, very clean-cut.” His mother fired Audrey a quick warning glance. “Weren’t you ever going to say something? Why would you keep that a secret?”

  He should have seen this coming—he’d known the boundary would have to be breached eventually, because they always were. But anger still plumed through him, and his chest felt so tight that
for a moment he couldn’t speak.

  “It isn’t a secret.” He squared his shoulders and glared down at the lukewarm, rubbery scrambled eggs he’d spent the last half hour cutting into pebbles. “It’s—there’s nothing untoward about wanting to conduct my own social life without keeping you apprised of every detail.”

  “That’s college for ‘mind your business,’ Ma,” said Audrey.

  “But it’s not a detail,” his mother protested, “it’s an entire person. I just don’t know why I haven’t even heard you mention a name.”

  “You don’t keep an inventory of all Audrey or Laurie’s friends, so I don’t see why—”

  His mother wrung her hands and gave him another smile, this one much more strained.

  “All I’m saying is that it’s a big change for you. I’d have thought you’d say something. I hope,” she added, as if it were an afterthought instead of the main thrust behind the line of questioning, “that it’s not because you’re ashamed to introduce us to your college friends.”

  Of course this left Paul little choice but to surrender. He harbored a vain hope that Julian would reject the invitation, and it felt like a deliberate jab in the ribs when he didn’t. That weekend, inevitably, Julian arrived at the house for lunch with a box of pistachio candies and a bundle of hothouse sunflowers. He was late—fashionably, he would have claimed—and slightly overdressed in the now-familiar way that made him seem like a character in an English novel. When he took off his overcoat, Paul caught the scarlet flash of a carnation pinned to his lapel.

  Paul was only ashamed because his mother had suggested he might be. The house felt smaller and dirtier now—sun-faded curtains, cheap detergent smells, a year’s patina of soot and grease on the outside of the windows. As if through a stranger’s ears he heard the small blemishes in his mother’s grammar, and the way her working-class accent, much thicker than his own, made every vowel as blunt and flat as a woodchip.